this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Capitalism is indefensible from a libertarian perspective. A central libertarian tenet is that legal and de facto responsibility should match. However, the capitalist employer-employee contract inherently involves a violation of this tenet. The employer gets 100% of the legal responsibility for the positive and negative results of the enterprise. Despite workers' joint de facto responsibility for using up inputs to produce outputs, workers as employees get 0%
@canada
It's been a long time since I've read any of this stuff - do you have a reference for the claim about legal and de facto responsibility?
That being said, I would argue that they are not incompatible but rather that capitalism acts as a constraint on liberty. That being said, it is the economic system in which liberty is maximized relative to any other system. No doubt that's why it has persisted.
Liberty and longevity are not directly related. History has in fact shown the opposite. Like… capitalism is only a few hundred years old at most, and has only existed in its current form since the 18th century. Compare that to systems of fuedalism, monarchism, places that have had oppressive regimes since conception like Saudi Arabia. Also look at how our current form of capitalism has subsisted largely on the backs of usee countries being bled and made to kneel by usar countries, which is arguably the largest contributor to its perceived longevity.
Sorry, by "persisted" I didn't mean to imply that it's the oldest. More that it is surviving where other systems have failed.
Article: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
Video: https://youtu.be/c2UCqzH5wAQ
Either one introduces the argument against capitalism based on the liberal principle of imputation.
Economic democracy, a market economy where worker coop is the only firm legal structure, maximizes liberty much better than capitalism
@canada
Interesting theory. Does this exist on any large scale anywhere in the world?
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100
https://www.usworker.coop/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
@canada
I understand that employee-owned companies exist (though I think it's rather telling that I haven't heard of any of them) but I thought this was a model for economic policy at the societal level. Those companies all exist within a capitalist economy.
The idea is to mandate worker coop structure on all firms.
It's not that telling. Without a worker coop mandate, there are collective action problems and market failures. It's harder for all the workers to cooperate to form a worker coop than an employer to hire up all the workers.
No society has a full worker coop mandate because the modern arguments for it were published in the 90s. Some countries do mandate some worker board representation and codetermination though
@canada
Mandating it doesn't seem to be consistent with individual liberty, though.
Forgive me for being pragmatic about this, but if this was such a good idea and consistent with the interests of the people, you wouldn't have to mandate it. This is how things would be done.
Political democracy also mandates legal non-transferability for voting rights. Would you allow people to sell or transfer their voting rights?
People prefer democratic firms: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/what-do-americans-want-from-private-government-experimental-evidence-demonstrates-that-americans-want-workplace-democracy/D9C1DBB6F95D9EEA35A34ABF016511F4
A mandate doesn't restrict any non-institutionally-described action as labor is de facto non-transferable. It only prevents fraudulently treating de facto responsible persons as legal non-responsible things.
Are we free when we can sell our freedom or when we can't even if we want to?
@canada
The only system compatible with full liberty is anarchy. But you stated that economic democracy is libertarian, and then proceeded to call for it to be mandated. Mandates are authoritarian, not libertarian.
Today's legal systems mandate that legal responsibility be non-transferable for crimes. The economic democracy position argues that legal responsibility should be generally non-transferable matching general non-transferability of de facto responsibility due to the principle of justice that legal and de facto responsibility should match. Not all mandates are authoritarian (e.g. a mandate that one must respect others' personal property). Employment violates workers' property rights
@canada